Creating a Map to Navigate the Post-Earthquake Landscape in Ecuador

An OpenStreetMap view of the region around the Ecuadorian city of Pedernales. The yellow areas of the grid indicate completed mapping, the green indicate validated portions, and the gray are portions that have been invalidated.

Courtesy OpenStreetMap

When the shaking, faint but jarring, began, Daniel Orellana, a geographer at the University of Cuenca, in southern Ecuador, was at home with his wife and daughter. It was Saturday evening, around 7 P.M. The tremors subsided, and Orellana eventually went back to a paper he was writing, then took his family to his mother’s house for her birthday. Ecuador, which sits on the seismically volatile part of the the Pacific basin called the Ring of Fire, has a number of active volcanoes and regular small earthquakes, so, although the reverberations were worrisome, they were also familiar to Orellana. He didn’t learn until he returned home, late that evening, that an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 had struck the northern coast, killing hundreds, injuring thousands, and collapsing roadways, bridges, and buildings across a wide swath of the country.

Orellana was well positioned to help. As part of an international platform called OpenStreetMap, he helped make maps of Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, of Japan in 2011, and of Nepal last year. OpenStreetMap, which was created in 2004, has been called the Wikipedia of cartography: it is the work of a global network of an estimated two million users, who construct editable maps of places that are typically off the grid. In more recent years, N.G.O.s like the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), which is based in Washington, D.C., have put the open-source data to more pointed use in relief work. After the earthquake struck in Ecuador, HOT sent out an e-mail to enlist volunteers to build up-to-date maps for aid workers. Each disaster response is coördinated and managed by a small group of local organizers—in this case, by Orellana and five others across the region.

Later Saturday night and early Sunday morning, Orellana and the rest of the team canvassed an array of public and private institutions, gathering information to take, in effect, before and after photos of the affected areas. The source materials for HOT efforts range from satellite images taken by state agencies and private companies, like Bing and Google, to government lists detailing the locations of schools, hospitals, and other public-infrastructure facilities. The local team then uploads all the information it has gathered onto a server, which can be accessed by volunteers all over the world. Each volunteer is given a grid to fill in with the data gathered from the satellite images and government legends, using each layer of information to make a composite image that more experienced mappers check for accuracy and precision. When an individual patch of the map is complete, you can see what, exactly, has been destroyed and how best to find possible survivors. “We’re providing data sets that the first responders don’t have,” Tyler Radford, HOT’s executive director, told me. “In the areas where we’re working, there are next to no map details available. You can’t tell how many people are living in some of these villages.” Given the significant numbers of volunteers that the project typically attracts, the work of populating these maps moves relatively quickly. In the forty-eight hours after last year’s earthquake in Nepal, an estimated two thousand volunteers managed to quadruple the amount of mapped terrain around the crisis zone.

“It’s a gigantic undertaking,” Orellana told me, when we spoke by phone late Sunday night. At present, there are about fifty-five volunteer mappers—from France, all over Latin America, and the U.S.—working with the HOT team in Ecuador. Some of the volunteers are geographers, but a lot of them are simply laypeople looking to help; they are learning as they go, prepped by an online tutorial and coached, by Orellana, on Google Hangouts. After one day, according to Orellana, the team had assembled about three per cent of the map of northern Ecuador prior to the earthquake. Within two weeks, he expects to be completely done with the “pre-earthquake map” and far along with the “post-earthquake map.” In the meantime, he is in constant communication with government relief workers, who often need to find new routes that avoid blocked or destroyed roads and bridges. “We do a lot on the fly,” he said. While the team is at work on the broader project, it responds to these more immediate calls for information, creating maps accordingly so workers can reach people faster.

One of the challenges in Ecuador, Orellana told me, is that the region is shrouded in a thick cloud cover, which can obscure satellite images. Universities across the country have offered to fly drones over the mountainous northern coast to take photographs, since drones can both skirt the clouds and maneuver around the craggy topography. Jenelle Eli, a spokesperson for the American Red Cross, told me that small villages nestled in the mountains were among the hardest hit, and that electricity and communications networks were down there. The Ecuadorian Red Cross has mobilized close to a thousand aid workers and volunteers so far, and they are supplying food, water, and emergency care where they can. But international relief organizations are still trying to assess the full extent of the damage, which is a challenge due to the remoteness of the areas affected. Orellana’s mapping teams are essential to that effort, Dale Kunce, a senior geospatial engineer at the Red Cross, told me. “The global mapping community is stronger now than it used to be,” he said. “We’re able to get on the phone faster with satellite-image providers to get the information we need. We have to get a sense of the damage—the buildings lost, the houses lost.”

While we spoke, the news grew even grimmer. In the thirty-six hours after the earthquake, there were more than two hundred aftershocks, some of them reaching a magnitude of 6.1. In Pedernales, a city of twenty thousand people, about forty miles from the epicenter, seventy per cent of the buildings were destroyed; the figure was even higher in other coastal towns. The much bigger city of Portoviejo, a hundred and twenty miles away from the epicenter, suffered enormous damage as well, with the mayor reporting that at least a hundred residents had been killed. As one writer for the Ecuadorian news site gkillcity.com put it, “The tragedy is so huge that losing your house and everything else you own isn’t even the worst-case scenario.”

Orellana, who worked away as the headlines portended worse, said that he felt grateful that he and his family were safe, and that he was moved that a bunch of volunteers, many of them living outside of Ecuador, had decided to help. “Instead of relaxing on a Sunday night, they’re making these maps from home,” he said. “We’re putting in time together.”